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Homecoming

The poems in Andrew Forster’s third collection continue his explorations of what it means to make a home: from Cumbria, where he now lives, to South Yorkshire where he grew up, this book is firmly rooted in the north of England. He works as Literature Officer for the Wordsworth Trust and the ghost of Wordsworth, that supreme poet of home, haunts many of these poems. As the poet approaches middle age, this is a book of settling down, of beginning to be content with what we have managed to distil from life.

‘Andrew Forster is well known and praised for his poems about places and their history and the people who live and lived there. Homecoming, his marvellous new collection, continues this theme. At its heart are a series of vivid poems about Wordsworth’s home in Grasmere. These are echoed and balanced by poems about Forster’s own childhood home … Whether writing about taking his father to a Bob Dylan concert, or his mother’s spectacles, or about De Quincey’s touching letter to Wordsworth’s young son, they are poems that radiate emotion.’– Vicki Feaver

‘An evocative perspective on living amidst the forces of nature’– Poetry Book Society Bulletin.

‘The calmness and precision in Andrew Forster’s poetry is admirable and even miraculous attimes. His poems in this new and rooted collection take stock of a new home in measured and carefully crafted lines. Nothing is hurried, nothing snatched. The proper time is taken to observe and write and as a result these poems don’t just describe a landscape, they seem to become part of it themselves.’– Sasha Dugdale